Ashqar Abdou

Ashqar Abdou (23 September 1969-12 July 2006) was a member of al-Qaeda from Egypt.

Biography
Ashqar Abdou was born on 23 September 1969 in Banha, Qalyubia Governorate, Egypt to a family of Sunni Muslim Egyptians. Abdou was originally a student of chemistry, but he later became a radical Islamist and gave up on science. In 1988 he left his university in Cairo and headed to Afghanistan, where he fought alongside the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union. Abdou was one of the cadets that impressed Osama bin Laden, who took him under his wing. Abdou was set to work on developing bombs using his science skills, and he was accused of planning to blow up the Marriott Hotel in Cairo with a truck bomb. Abdou was imprisoned by Egypt from 1992 to 1995, when he was released from prison. He returned to al-Qaeda and developed many plots with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda's second-in-command. Abdou ran a bomb-making course at the al-Farouq training camp in Afghanistan until 2001, when the United States invaded Afghanistan. His factory was blown up in an airstrike by the USAF during the November 2001 invasion, and Abdou fled to the tribal belt of Pakistan, an al-Qaeda safehaven.

On 12 July 2006 Ashqar Abdou and two other al-Qaeda members were assassinated by the CIA in a drone strike in North Waziristan while they were driving in a white compact car. His death was a setback to al-Qaeda, which lost one of its bomb-makers.